RFC 4645bis: making 'pes' and 'prs' extlangs

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Sat Dec 6 02:48:13 CET 2008


From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Michael Everson

>> I learned how "Farsi" was an Indo-european language in an
>> introductory linguistics course as an undergrad.
>
> Forgive me. But so what?
...

> Persian is the term used in linguistics, and in all of the decent
> dictionaries.

Persian is the term used by _some_ linguists. It may be used in all "decent" dictionaries, though I'm just sure what metric for "decent" is assumed. The "so what" of Randy's earlier point is that Persian is *not* the term that is *always* used in linguistics, or by all English-speaking linguists.

But I have no qualms suggesting that "Persian" is an English-language name for the language in question and should be listed as such in entries for "pes", and perhaps also for "prs" (though from what I've seen, "Dari" is more likely to be used by English speakers to refer to that language than "Persian").


> We are going to propose changes to ISO 639-3, and we will
> succeed in making our case.

Quite sure of ourselves, are we? If you are asking for names with "Persian" to be added, I doubt you'd get any pushback. If you want the current names removed, that perhaps might be different. (Just taking a guess at possible reaction.)


Peter



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